Carole King makes music in her 'living room,' and we get to watch

Published 4:00 am, Monday, August 23, 2004

Carole King performs at the Masonic Auditorium in her first visit to the Bay Area in many years. She sang her greetings to the crowd. Chronicle photo by David Paul Morris

Carole King performs at the Masonic Auditorium in her first visit to the Bay Area in many years. She sang her greetings to the crowd. Chronicle photo by David Paul Morris

Carole King makes music in her 'living room,' and we get to watch

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Above everything else she does -- vocalist, pianist, entertainer - - Carole King is a songwriter first and foremost.

Seated at the baby grand on a stage decorated with sofa, easy chair, lamps and a couple of potted plants, King played bare-bones versions of her songs Friday at the Masonic Auditorium, in her first local performance in many moons.

She said she hadn't toured since 1994, but also allowed she spent virtually the entire previous decade "dropped out" in Sun Valley, Idaho. Always a reluctant performer who preferred making music offstage in studios and rehearsal halls, she hasn't been around much at all since her heyday in the '70s, when her second solo album, "Tapestry," beat out the "Sound of Music" soundtrack to become the best-selling album of all time.

She looked about five minutes older and, almost immediately, it was like she had never been away at all. Wearing a simple black pantsuit, she opened with the feel-good "Beautiful" off that landmark album and, in a moment, had the capacity crowd eating from the palm of her hand.

She brought out a couple of other musicians, country songwriter Gary Burr and her current record producer, Ruby Guess, to add occasional guitar and bass. But basically it was just Carole King, pounding the piano as loudly as ever and singing with the uncommon grace and soul she always has had.

King was little more than a teenager when she astounded Brill Building big shots like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with her skills. A young mother living in Queens, she and her then husband Gerry Goffin leaped to the top of the pop songwriting world starting with "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," a No. 1 hit for the Shirelles in 1961.

The 1971 "Tapestry" album was a singer-songwriter, soft-rock masterpiece that perfectly caught the tempo of the times and was introduced by the hit recording of her song "You've Got a Friend" by James Taylor, yet her '60s teen pop songs remain very much a part of her story. In concert she celebrated the breadth of her career with a medley of her and Goffin's early songwriting hits that closed the first half and rousing full-length versions of "Chains" (a song covered by the Beatles), "(You Make Me Feel Like ) A Natural Woman" (Aretha Franklin) and "Locomotion" (Little Eva) to bring the curtain down.

But she also interspersed recent compositions that stood shoulder-to- shoulder with her best. "Lay Down My Life," which she said was inspired by (but not included in) the 1990 Jason Patric movie, "After Dark, My Sweet," was a somewhat uncharacteristic desperate ballad, verging on overblown, that she admitted was not typical ("I don't usually do dark"). She sang the title song from her little noticed 2001 album, "Love Makes the World," which she wrote with urban remix specialists Dave Schommer and Sam Hollander of Pop Rox, and it still sounded like a Carole King song.

She suffuses whatever she does with what collaborator Burr called "those Carole King chords," invariably set in a middle tempo and similar keys. She is so versed in her own style that when she, Burr and Guess engaged in an impromptu songwriting demonstration -- and Guess shackled the project by insisting the song include "Sacramento" in the title -- it still came out all Carole King when she quickly cobbled together a handful of lines ending with the punch line "Any city's Sacramento when you're in love."

Songwriter that she is, King sang her greetings to the crowd, an open and witty piece about what her concert was going to be like called "Welcome to My Living Room." For the next two hours, she did indeed act for all the world like that's where she was and that everybody there was her dear friend.

That kind of honest warmth is timeless -- and so rare on the concert stage. At age 62, King, whose name will be spoken alongside those of the greatest songwriters of the last century, has proved to be a classic herself.